


Small Intimacies

by tielan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 20:06:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6165121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s making a new life now; not easy, but better than anything he’s hoped for since he came out of the fog of his brainwashing and understood who he was, who he’d been, what they’d made him into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Intimacies

**Author's Note:**

> A tumblr prompt: "♧: One character playing with the other’s hair Bucky/Maria"

She reads the reports on the floor, tucked between the coffee table and the couch. And he sits on the couch and watches her and the news by turns – just an everyday, ordinary couple.

Of course, there’s the earpiece she wears the way some women wear jewellery. There’s the spread of mission briefings, and agent profiles, and support troop movements for the Avengers out across the coffee table. And there’s metal arm whose inner workings lie open to the air as he checks the mechanisms inside.

They moved the couch so he could sit on it and see all the windows, all the doors.

She didn’t question his request, although it’s her apartment.

He didn’t explain himself, although he wanted to.

Old habits die hard.

He’s making a new life now; not easy, but better than anything he’s hoped for since he came out of the fog of his brainwashing and understood who he was, who he’d been, what they’d made him into. And somewhere between the Avengers and the Registration Act, between Ragnarok and the Infinity Wars, he worked out that he could still make friends, could still trust, could still desire.

He learned he could still fall in love.

He learned he could still be befriended, trusted, desired.

He learned he could still be loved.

The arm mechanisms are still operating, although he’s noticed a slight delay in the responses. It will need a more extensive maintenance before long – something that they need to discuss sooner or later.

He flips the access closed, and the nanos seal the edges, melding together until the gleaming panels show no sign that there was an opening there at all.

“We could find someone to work on that, if you want,” she says without looking up from her report. “It doesn’t have to be Stark.”

She knows how he feels about Stark after the Registration War; but if he has issues with the man’s methods and madness, he can’t help admiring the technology. That still doesn’t mean he wants Stark Industries technology anywhere near him.

“And if they’re HYDRA?”

“Then we’ve flushed one more rat out of the woodwork.” She tilts her head back to look up at him and even upside-down her expression is frank and without judgement. “It’s an option.”

“I’ll think about it.” He reaches out his hand – the human one – and trails his fingers through the curling sheen of her hair. “Not too long,” he adds.

One brow arches? “The hair or the thinking?”

He smiles. “Both.” She had her hair long when he first met her; and then cut it off during Ragnarok – a sleek, fitted cut - “pixie” they call it – that displays the shape of her head and the curve of her neck.

Bucky likes the shape of her head and the curve of her neck. The way she doesn’t angle her head away from his touch. The line of her cheek rubbing against his fingers, and the brush of her hair against his knuckles.

Little things, so crucial.

Lieutenant Barnes would have put the moves on her, eager for more. The Winter Soldier wouldn’t have touched her in the first place.

But Bucky just sits there and lets his fingers skim her hair.

Small intimacies.


End file.
